The Ford Motor Company has announced a new round of updates for the Mustang's 2016 model year, whose timing no doubt has been purposefully made to coincide with this week's arrival of an all-new Chevrolet Camaro.More >>

The Ford Motor Company has announced a new round of updates for the Mustang's 2016 model year, whose timing no doubt has been purposefully made to coincide with this week's arrival of an all-new Chevrolet Camaro.More >>

Known and respected for its ability to blend daily-driver comfort with world-class handling and pace, the first-generation Audi R8 ran from 2007 through 2015 as the brand's halo car. Now, it's fresh once again.More >>

Known and respected for its ability to blend daily-driver comfort with world-class handling and pace, the first-generation Audi R8 ran from 2007 through 2015 as the brand's halo car. Now, it's fresh once again.More >>

The whole world seems to be going turbo. That's mostly a good thing. In the case of the Mercedes-AMG C63 S, it's a very good thing.More >>

The whole world seems to be going turbo. That's mostly a good thing. In the case of the Mercedes-AMG C63 S, it's a very good thing.More >>

By Marty Padgett

We know what you love. You love to see guys warp by in Aventadors and Corvette Stingrays and SRT Vipers because . . . Aventador, Stingray, Viper. It can make your day to know someone's ripping off a redline run, even if it isn't you.

The opposite of that place is your dark space -- where you'll find the cars and drivers guaranteed to tick you off. They fire up instant rage, and it's not your fault. It's theirs -- partly the car itself, but mostly because of the drivers that flock to it and use it as an instrument of driving cruelty. Ever been waterboarded by a minivan doing 66 mph in the left lane, Captain Clueless at the wheel? We feel your pain.

Idiot drivers with contemptible cars can ruin a perfectly good strafing run down a clean stretch of road. The first trick is knowing when to spot them a mile ahead. That gives you plenty of time to steer clear, blow by, and mellow out once you're back up to cruising speed, safe in the knowledge you'll never pick one of these for your own personal whip:

What the SUV was to the 1990s, the Prius is to our postmodem era. The Prius isn't just a car, it's an almost mythic collision of potent cultural totems--kinda like Miley Cyrus going Mach 2-inappropriate with a huge styrofoam hand. (Go Packers!) Like you, we hate the Prius because it pushes the act of driving off the marquee, down there with the other former Disney child stars, while it preaches at the rest of us. Smug greens, families with a conscience, HOV-lane opportunists--they're all so busy trying to save the planet, they're too distracted to pick a lane, any lane, other than the middle one.

Mercury Sable

Gramma, no! The Sable was the Grand Marquis for retirees too fiscally conservative to buy a real Grand Marquis, which makes this one a frequent flyer in the far, far, far right lane. You'll never be able to exit again, ever. On a personal note, the Sable was badge engineering at its least engineer-y, and that made us cynical about all that was latter-day Mercury. Pro tip: all the cool elderly people who can barely pass the vision test are driving Scions, anyway.

Pontiac Firebird

Like Burt Reynolds, the Pontiac Firebird will not go quietly into the night. Or the day. Or even the next intersection. It's a car that can't do anything at a normal sound level, once its Canadian-coiffed pilot grabs a gear. For God's sake, man, an engineer worked overtime to design that exhaust system and muffler. Use it. We need some sleep.

The classic white windowless van

Nothing says legit -- or eclipses your entire view of the road ahead--like a white van with no small-business magnetic decals, no side glass, and no FM radio. Either way, nature says "approach with caution!" Pass it the same way, since you'll never be able to see around this rolling Amber Alert without a Ouija board and a sophisticated network of camera drones.

We give props to the first real hybrid, but these anti-speed Skinner experiments are a supermagnet for hypermilers driving dangerously. They ignore all traffic laws in the quest for another tenth of a gallon to chump their buds on Fuelly, ignoring the multi-car fireball they just triggered across the downtown connector at rush hour. The worst part? It's considered politically incorrect to snicker at their fender skirts.

This car is awesome and so is its driver -- no, really, just ask him. His car ego is sated by the NSX's unspoiled aluminum beauty, while his paranoid wallet scrapes by on legendary Acura reliability. Hey, we respect the VTEC. However, every single classic NSX we see on the road is being nursed along on a budget, rolling slow to avoid chewing up $1000 tires every 3000 miles, coming to complete stops every 800 feet to avoid scraping that snowplow of a chin spoiler. The most practical supercar ever still is pretty impractical, and that pisses us all off like you don't know what.

HUMMER H2 SUT

The automotive equivalent of the Atlanta Olympics' mascot Whatizit, the H2 SUT just pisses us off with its mixed signals. You too, right? Is it an SUV, a truck, some kind of Kriegerbot, or just an in joke only product planners get? It's like it never really wanted to be practical or useful or, dare we say, subtle. We admit to a mancrush on the H2 and the H1, but, this? No. Pictured here making Las Vegas look even more like a Photoshopped figment of our imaginations, the H2-with-a-hot-tub was precisely the vehicle that a culture that invented the phrase "don't hate the player, hate the game" deserved.

Lamborghini Veneno

Well, they only made four. Each one costs about $4 million. We didn't make either cut either, but hey, we did brave Geneva's Palexpo on two hours' sleep to get this picture to give to you for free. Shall we continue?

Any family wagon that's more than $20,000 and doesn't have an easy-clean interior pisses us off. We know you agree. We've been asked, "Who takes a $90,000 Range Rover off-road?" Stock retort: "Who puts a pack of nine-year-old boys in a $40,000 luxury van after soccer practice?" We shouldn't pick on the Odyssey, since it's our top-ranked minivan, but it softballs in a nice, teachable moment in irony. Honda actually had a $20,000, wipe-down-able wagon in the Element--which it cancelled, in favor of a less practical, more expensive van named either after a Homeric epic (Greek, not Simpsons) or the third-best gaming console of 1978.

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